Wow! 100 year old color photographs of Czarist Russia

This isn't about wine or food or San Francisco or music, but these pictures are so incredible and eye-popping that I am compelled to blog about them. It's almost like a time machine, transporting you back to Czarist Russia before Lennin's Revolution. My grandfather on my father's side was Russian (or Polish, depending on how you want to look at it) and I'm certain that he grew up looking at scenes exactly like those depicted in these incredible photos.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), was photographer to the Czar and spent 10 years between 1905 and 1915 traveling around the Russian empire documenting what he saw. Amazingly, Gorskii took his pictures in color using an ingenious camera that took three exposures through red, blue, and green filters. High resolution digital scanners and Adobe Photoshop didn't exist 100 years ago, Gorskii had to make do with a lantern projector with three colored filters focused on one image. Today, we can use the aforementioned digital media tools to create the most amazing pictures which you can see here, at Alex Gridenko's website.

For more digital realizations of this amazing trove of material, look at the Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit of the Library of Congress. And for details on how these images were created, look at this page.